The brain is truly an amazing thing

OK, so I often walk around with my phone (BB Tour) in my left front pocket. I recently had to send it back and get a new one because the camera broke (I use the camera a lot at work). I've been walking around with this new smart phone in my pocket for a few days now and I've noticed that it tends to get a little warm; much warmer than the old one. I have seen reports of phone batteries "exploding", so this has got me a little worried-- probably irrationally but that's beside the point. Driving home tonite I felt the damn thing getting downright hot. Better take it out of my pocket, just in case. So I reach for it, and ..... care to guess what comes next? It wasn't there!!! I had put it in my backpack before I left!

The mind playing tricks - aka, the "religious" or "paranormal" experience. You are at least lucid enough to spot it and not invent convoluted spooky explanations. The more I think about it, the more the mind and cognitive function resembles a web browser/proxy/server transaction.

Observe this diagram -

The proxy is where your frequently used memories are - it is not reality per se, but the most recent known good copy of reality stored for speed of access. The mundane reality of the phone in your pocket is a trivial piece of information and reading it from the cache will do. If it was somehow triggered to become more important information, eg. you just got an SMS, your brain wouldn't just go to the cache, but would hit "refresh" and bypass the cache to retrieve a fresh copy of the information out from the real world.

It is a fun game to play - trying to catch your mind playing tricks on you. It is also a good habit all round to prevent yourself from turning into a superstitious babble head.

It's fantastic walking around for a little while with this little paranoid streak: "Whoa, that thing I just saw out of the corner of my eye, was that real?" "My elbow itches. I wonder if that has anything to do with my elbow at all, or if it's all in my head."

Thanks for "getting it"! How often do you tell somebody something like that and get some superstitious bullshit in return? I feel like slapping people sometimes and saying "You totally missed the point! We're fantastic!"